Official Contest Announcing Open Campaign Contests

We just released an update to the campaign page (or will shortly) that links to a submission form and to a post on the forum with details.

We announced a while back that we were considering moving from a Campaign Contest that has a start + end date (like we did for Campaign 1+2) and moving to a open campaign contest around general themes and types of tracks that will be generic enough to classify all tracks. The main reasons we are doing this is that it better aligns with the openness of Free Rider (mix of difficulty + themes), no limits placed on authors, no hard deadlines (authors forcing themselves to take shortcuts or not participate) and removes the requirement to have Campaign X tracks added before starting on Campaign X+1.

The general themes and types of tracks that we are going to go with initially in no specific order are:

• Action
• Fantasy
• Western
• Mountains
• Trials
• Dirt Jumping
• Spooky (think Halloween!) **added 16/10/2014**
• City (for those City tracks that don't necessarily fit into the other themes) **added 16/10/2014**
• Sci-fi **added 13/01/2014**
• Water **added 27/03/2014**
• Nature **added 27/03/2014**

We hope that with those categories that all tracks currently submitted could fit into one of them.

You can submit a track yourself through the Form below or through the one linked to from each Campaign Category post. We will be keeping an eye out for candidate tracks ourselves through the newly submitted so even if you don’t submit it for a campaign directly it may still be added to one.

Prizes include:

• bragging rights
• opportunity to have your track played by millions
• official author status
• and potentially some swag (currently our swag is stickers + pins)

 

That is the plan, we will be updating the language to "official" in the near future, perks remain the same.

 

I just love these contests and watching people submit tracks, awesome !
Dirt jumps seems a bit boring for a theme but we'll see. What happened to the other tracks in campaign 2 btw? Will there still be tracks added? Right now there is a huge jump in difficulty.

 

We may add some easier tracks, problem is we have some really awesome tracks that are very challenging, some of our favorites are below:

http://frhd.co/t/51782-panorama-ce - completion rate of 0.46
http://frhd.co/t/52770-distinctive - completion rate of 0.2
http://frhd.co/t/53240-royalty - completion rate of 0.28
http://frhd.co/t/52952-abandoned - completion rate of 0.12
http://frhd.co/t/53178-adrenaline-rush - completion rate of 0.29

One of the things we have in the queue is to "Skip track" for unbeaten campaign tracks which would unlock a future track, for a track that you skipped once you beat it a new track will not unlock so a player will always stay at 2 unlocked once they have beaten all previous skipped. Skipping will cost coins and cost will go up per skip so players that can beat it should and those that hit a wall can at least keep going down the campaign path if they want or hit some random tracks to practice a bit more.

Our plan for campaigns is to keep an eye out for "easy" tracks that may fit into current holes with campaign 1 / 2 based on completion rate.